ABSTRACT
This chapter engages in two major themes. First, it will explore the different perceptions of people to the epidemic plague that ravaged eastern India during the closing years of the nineteenth century. It will also describe interaction between people and the state in the struggle with the epidemc, a tragic saga that merits fresh historical interrogation. And, second, as a corollary to this, it will explore the multiple ways in which the rhetoric of Western medical intervention was contested by a popular construction of the disease. The primary objective here will be to capture the reality of the epidemic in its social setting. It will view the disease and its proposed remedial measures, the prophylactics, as functions of power and knowledge informed by the relationship between the ruler and the ruled in a colonial society. The colonial administration did not have a homogeneous perception about how to deal with the plague, and reacted differently in different situations. Nor did all categories of people react to the epidemic in a similar way; their opposition to the colonial state was not uniform either. The study seeks to interrogate how these multiple layers of perception were imbricated in the societal situation.
